Imaging Planet Formation Inside the Diffraction Limit

由加州大学欧文分校的首席研究员领导的一个研究小组将对附近的年轻恒星进行调查，寻找行星形成的证据。对成熟的行星系统和被认为是围绕其形成行星的年轻恒星的数千次观测现在已经存在。尽管有如此丰富的数据，但关于行星是如何形成的，人们却知之甚少。为了更好地理解这一过程，需要直接拍摄行星形成的图像。虽然距离年轻恒星很远，使观测变得困难，但正在形成的行星应该可以用今天的望远镜探测到。该项目将使用一种新的成像方法来搜索大量年轻恒星周围的行星，并有可能探测到正在形成的巨型行星。本科生将通过加州桥和CAMPARE计划得到指导，该计划旨在增加完成物理和/或天文学研究生学习的人数不足的学生。在过去四年加州大学布里奇分校的毕业生中(所有人都是少数族裔或女性，或两者兼而有之)，82%的人继续攻读物理学和/或天文学的研究生课程。该计划将对大约35个过渡盘进行调查，以探测可能导致原行星盘清理的正在形成的行星。这项调查将使用非冗余掩模(NRM)的高分辨率成像技术，它通过光瞳平面掩模将传统望远镜转变为干涉阵列。NRM观测将解决比传统方法小几倍的轨道分离问题(对大多数目标来说，最小可达7个天文单位)。这项调查将使用3.8微米的Keck/NIRC2成像仪进行，使其比以前在较短波长下进行的原行星搜索更具质量敏感性。总体来说，这项调查将在95%的置信度下将这些天体中潜在的快速增长的行星数量限制在~15%以内。这一裁决反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

A research team led by a Principal Investigator from the University of California-Irvine will survey young, nearby stars looking for evidence of planet formation. Thousands of observations of mature planetary systems and of young stars around which planets are thought to form now exist. Despite this wealth of data, remarkably little is known about how planets form. Direct images of forming planets are needed to better understand this process. While the large distances to young stars make these observations difficult, forming planets should be detectable by today's telescopes. This program will use a new imaging method to search for planets around a large sample of young stars and has the potential to detect giant forming planets. Undergraduate students will be mentored through the Cal-Bridge and CAMPARE programs, which aim to increase the number of underrepresented students who complete graduate studies in physics and/or astronomy. Of the graduating Cal-Bridge scholars in the last four years (all of which have been underrepresented minorities or women, or both), 82% have gone on to a graduate program in physics and/or astronomy. This program will conduct a survey of about 35 transition disks to detect forming planets that might be causing the protoplanetary disk clearings. The survey will use the high-resolution imaging technique of non-redundant masking (NRM), which turns a conventional telescope into an interferometric array via a pupil-plane mask. The NRM observations will resolve orbital separations several times smaller than traditional methods (down to ~7 Astronomical Units for most targets). The survey will be carried out using the Keck/NIRC2 imager at 3.8 microns, making it more mass-sensitive than previous protoplanet searches, which were executed at shorter wavelengths. In its entirety, the survey will constrain the underlying rapidly-accreting planet population in these objects to within ~15% at 95% confidence.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.